Fifteen years removed from his Oscar-winning turn in
Leaving Las Vegas, Nicolas Cage found himself on an acting treadmill of ever-decreasing
returns.

Many years of cut-rate sci-fi (
Knowing); bargain-basement action (
Bangkok Dangerous,
Stolen); and lesser comic-book fare (two
Ghost Rider films) had done a number on his reputation in Hollywood and among
moviegoers.

Ongoing tax problems and tabloid attention didn’t help, either.

So, on the cusp of turning 50, Cage took a year off.

“I knew I was going to be very selective about what I would do next,” he said.

He was.

The actor’s comeback — which he won’t call a “comeback” — is as the title character in
Joe, a movie directed by David Gordon Green, who is known for
Pineapple Express but has built his career on independent films. (
Joe will open nationwide on Friday.)

“He’s fascinating to me,” Green said of Cage. “He’s gone off in so many different directions,
switched gears so many times in so many different genres, that I loved the idea of creating this
role that was unlike anything he’d ever done.”

Green wrote Cage “a sweet-talking letter” with the screenplay adaptation that Green’s college
professor had written based on a hard-boiled, Southern-fried Larry Brown novel.

If Cage took the part, Joe would be “unlike anybody I’ve ever played before,” he said.

“In some ways, he’s an amalgamation of different sorts of roles I’ve taken on in the past.”

A quiet working-class train wreck in rural Texas with a taste for alcohol and a violent streak,
Joe would mash up Cage’s tragic
Leaving Las Vegas drunk and his vengeful
Drive Angry character — and put the actor through the wringer.

“He has this Robert Mitchum quality,” Green said. “That’s who I was thinking of as I read the
novel. Something kind of creepy about Joe, something kind of scary. You want that dude to be your
friend, because, if he was on your bad side, you’d be scared.

“Cage is the only actor I can think of who won an Oscar for drama, has been a leading man in
lots of successful comedies and who has really manhandled action scenarios. He has that dramatic
quality that heroic leading men have. He’s the only living actor who can say that.”

Cage felt an instant connection to the character, he said. What he didn’t say is that working on
an indie film could be a way of hitting his career’s reset button.

Green has made a few Hollywood hits (
The Sitter), but his indie credibility is built on movies such as
Snow Angels and the recent
Prince Avalanche.

“No one can really tell how a movie will come out,” Cage said. “But this, to me, seemed like the
best chance to be something special. You look at David’s previous work, his talents and his vision
of this South that we never see on the screen, and you figure this is a pretty good bet to
make."

Joe lives in a dump of a house in a corner of eastern Texas where
dump is redundant. It is filled with hard country folk battered by hard lives, prone to
skinning a deer in their ruin of a kitchen, where guns, bourbon and knives are the essentials of
life. Joe runs a work crew for a timber company, a pickup labor force of people even lower on the
economic ladder than he is.

It’s hard not to see Cage in the guy: a man with demons and a substance-abusing past but a
strong work ethic and “a code” — kindhearted enough to take a homeless kid onto his crew because
the boy needs a break. Joe is a man in search of redemption.

The movie and the role have earned praise from critics. David Rooney of
The Hollywood Reporter described Cage’s portrayal as “bone-deep”; Eric Kohn of Indiewire
suggested that the film “marks a new beginning for some of its characters . . . and (its)
star."

“Being blessed with this career and this life in the arts,” Cage said, “has enabled me to
channel my dreams and my frustrations, my problems and my bad times, into something positive, I
hope, on the screen.”